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Daniel Bacchieri’s award winning StreetMusicMap



Street Music around the world through the lens of Daniel Bacchieri’s award winning StreetMusicMap project

The flow of news into media from around the world tends to be framed around sensational incidents and staged imagery. But to have a true experience of a place and its local people check out StreetMusicMap on Instagram. Videos of street musicians shot by passersby capture the energy and characteristics that define cultures. We get to see the similarities of people on the streets of the world as they are going about their daily lives. 

Created in 2014 by Brazilian journalist Daniel Bacchieri, StreetMusicMap is a collaborative listing of street music performers from all over the world. The Instagram channel has more than 41,000 followers and 1,350 artists documented on videos in 97 countries, all filmed by more than 700 collaborators. The project is a multimedia platform that includes a map, video series, podcast and music playlists.  

In this BBC interview Bacchieri talks about how and why he started the project, well-known musicians who performed on the streets in their early careers, and more.

[Above: still from video by David Bates/StreamingMuseum in Seoul, South Korea]


MUSICIANS


These videos are among the over 1350 found on Street Music Map’s Instagram and in the ‘Follow’ links below

Tash Sultana is a young, dynamic artist creating waves and generating massive street buzz by playing sold out shows all over the World. Tash made a name for herself busking on the streets of Melbourne, selling out shows with no promo and having homemade videos go viral online getting tens of millions of views. She performed here in 2014 on the street in Melbourne, and was among Street Music Map’s first IGs when it recorded only 15 seconds.


FOLLOW

 

StreetMusicMap on Google Maps: goo.gl/8dyBf6

Map of Street Music Festivals: goo.gl/Y1krZF

DANIEL BACCHIERI

Daniel Bacchieri is a journalist, film director, multimedia producer and music curator. He was born in the city of Rio Grande, Brazil and is based in São Paulo. Bacchieri is the Founder and Curator of StreetMusicMap, a global coverage on street music. In 2017 he was a Fellow at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism (CUNY – The City University of New York). In 2018 and 2017 a Webby Award Nominee. In 2017, the W³ Awards Silver Winner (StreetMusicMap Instagram) and a NYC Media Lab ’17 Participant. In 2018 he participated in the Mapping the Musical City Symposium in London

His most recent works are focused on documentaries and branded content, produced by and for NBA Entertainment, Instagram & HardPin Media (NYC), VICE Brazil, Zeppelin Filmes (Brazil), Coca-Cola, Toyota, Sony, Diageo.


THE STORY


“Brazilian journalist creates world map of street music and wins entrepreneurship scholarship to study in New York” 

by Marina Estarque for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas Full article here It was in the beginning of 2014 (late January) when i created a project about street musicians on Instagram. But my first insight came around in August 2013, in the streets of Kiev, Ukraine: during that personal trip, I recorded a short video of a musician and posted it on my personal Instagram profile. He was playing a string instrument I had never seen called bandura. I was going to take a picture, but Instagram had just released its 15-seconds video format. I made the recording and realized that 15 seconds was an interesting length for a narrative.

After that trip, I moved to São Paulo for professional reasons (I was living in Porto Alegre before), where I began to record street musicians that I encountered on the way home. I spent a lot of time at the Consolação subway station, where several buskers play. I started recording and putting the music videos on my personal Instagram account. Then I created a series, with the hashtag #streetmicrodocs. A great friend of mine, called Max Laux, gave me a single and important tip: “Why don’t you turn this street music series of yours into an Instagram account?”. Months later, during a free consultation from the Brazilian Startups’ Association (ABStartups), I changed the name of the project to StreetMusicMap. Later, Instagram increased the video length to 1 minute, which was very important for the project. 

In the last 4 years, StreetMusicMap became a multimedia project: a collaborative listing of street music performers from all over the world. It has more than 1,350 artists documented on videos in 97 countries, filmed by more than 700 collaborators, and up to 41,000 followers on Instagram. StreetMusicMap Instagram won Silver at the 2017 W³ Awards (Content & Marketing-Social Video for Social category) and it is a two-time Webby Award Nominee (Social — Music category in 2017 and 2018), chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences as the top 5 in its category in the world.

The StreetMusicMap itself is being developed to share full info about the artists. A live album with street bands from São Paulo, Brazil, was released in 2016: StreetMusicMap Vol. 1 – Live at O.bra Festival (Loop Discos). StreetMusicMap Radio is the new podcast launched in 2017. It is also the first project to curate street musicians on Spotify, creating global playlists featuring the best buskers in the world. The research has been shared by important media companies, such as BBC, The Guardian, CityLab, HuffPost, Atlas Obscura, AdWeek, WFMU Radio, Instagram (Music Department), and universities: University of Texas at Austin (Journalism in the Americas), CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, University of Toronto, The New School, Newcastle University (UK) and Monash University (Melbourne, Australia).

B.B. King, Édith Piaf, Eric Clapton, Jay-Z: all these big names started out on the street, where there are a lot of good people doing it, but we rush so much these days that we do not even pay attention to the things around us. I consider myself a reporter no matter the name of my job, because I always try to tell a story, when I’m producing, writing or recording.

I always try to give credit to the artist and to the person who made the recording. In the beginning, I was a purist and did not post without the musician’s name. But over time, I realized that the platform became a channel for promotion, because many anonymous artists were being identified in the comments. This was the case of a video of a Russian harpist playing in Red Square in Moscow. The recording was posted without her name, and minutes later, the artist identified herself in the comments: “:D wow! It’s me!”

In another case, a social worker in the Democratic Republic of Congo sent a message to me thanking for the sequence of videos published with African musicians. She said she was able to explain to deaf-mute students the different cultures of the African continent just with the musicians’ body language.

For Instagram, the charm is that the video gives you the sensation of traveling the world. That’s why I like raw videos with little production. There’s the dog barking, the car passing, and the immediate audience reaction. That sound of the street is the differential, you feel like a witness.


PRESS


1. BBC World Service “Daniel Bacchieri collects recordings of street musicians from all over the world and posts them on his website StreetMusicMap” vimeo.com/238269914 medium.com/journalism-innovation/nyc-streetmusicmap-a-powerful-match-aa41dd328120

2. Journalism in the Americas – University of Texas at Austin “Brazilian journalist creates world map of street music and wins entrepreneurship scholarship to study in New York” knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-17759-brazilian-journalist-creates-world-map-street-music-and-wins-entrepreneurship-scholars

3. Instagram “Daniel Bacchieri Wants to Create the World’s Biggest Network of Street Musicians” blog.instagram.com/post/134130711697/151128-streetmusicmap

4. HuffPost “You Might Be Able To Find Your Favorite Street Musician On This Platform” huffingtonpost.com/entry/you-might-be-able-to-find-your-favorite-street-musician-on-this-platform_us_566b13f7e4b009377b24d4a8

5. Atlas Obscura (USA) “A Growing Archive of Global Street Music” atlasobscura.com/articles/street-music-map-podcast

6. CityLab (USA) “The New Podcast Spotlighting NYC’s Street Musicians” citylab.com/navigator/2017/03/the-new-podcast-spotlighting-nycs-street-musicians/521214/

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